Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza (24 November 1632 – 21 February 1677, later Benedict de Spinoza) was a Dutch philosopher. The breadth and importance of Spinoza's work was not fully realized until many years after his death. By laying the groundwork for the 18th-century Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism, including modern conceptions of the self and, arguably, the universe, he came to be considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy. His magnum opus, the posthumous Ethics, in which he opposed Descartes's mind–body dualism, has earned him recognition as one of Western philosophy's most important thinkers. In the Ethics, "Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed entirely." Philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said of all contemporary philosophers, "You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all." Tossup Questions # This man described human nature in terms of a type of striving called conatus, which is altered by "active joy,' "active desire", and other affects. This man divided knowledge into three increasingly clear categories: experientia vaga, ratio, and scientia intuitive. He inspired the analysis of "multitude" in Hardt and Negri's Empire. The only book this man published under his own name was a critique of Descartes' Principles of Philosophy. This man defined "attribute" as "what the intellect perceives of a substance as constituting its essence" in a list of fifteen propositions starting one book. He wrote that Moses did not write the Torah in Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. For 10 points, name this philosopher whose pantheism, expounded in his Ethics, led to his expulsion from Dutch Jewry. # A controversy over this man's religious thought prompted a pamphlet on David Hume's use of a word for "belief." That word, "glaube," was roundly derided in an 18th-century controversy about this man's thought sparked by a conversation about him between Gotthold Lessing and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, the latter of whom maintained that this man was a materialist. In his own time, he was castigated for pointing out that the Bible is "imperfect, corrupt, erroneous, and inconsistent with itself," and fragmentary. In this man's major text on religion, he claimed that the persistence of Jews as a race was mainly due to their fastidiousness in requiring circumcision, and that the Torah should not be followed because it was only fit to serve as the state constitution of ancient Israel. This man's central religious belief was of "Deus sive Natura," signifying his belief that nature and God consisted of one and the same substance. For 10 points, name this author of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. # This philosopher divided knowledge into received opinion, scientific reason, and a grasp of the system of the cosmos via intuition. He described passions stemming from one's own nature as "active" and those from external causes as "passive." In one work, he posited that Ezra rather than Moses wrote the Pentateuch. This author of On the Improvement of the Understanding divided the characteristics of reality into substance, attribute, and mode in a book written in "geometric order," which declared that God and Nature are one, a statement of his pantheism. For 10 points, name this 17th century Dutch Jewish philosopher who wrote Tractacus Theologico-Politicus and Ethics. # This philosopher claimed that the mind can be filled wholly with joy by loving something eternal and infinite and argued that because miracles are declared according to the understanding of ignorant masses, they cannot be used to prove God's existence. This author of On the Improvement of the Understanding discussed how it follows from the nature of a triangle that its three interior angles should not be equal to two right angles and claimed that God is (*) Nature and Nature is God in his most famous work, which refutes Descartes's mind-body dualism and advocates Pantheism. For ten points, name this excommunicated Dutch Jewish philosopher who wrote Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and Ethics. # This man thought that every mode must be conceived through an attribute, where attributes are the intellect's perception of substances. He claimed that people have "inadequate ideas" because they are stuck in their bodies, and opened one work by claiming "A substance is prior in nature to its affections" to start off a list of fifteen propositions. This man argued that the (*) Torah was compiled rather than revealed to Moses in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and described passions as "human bondage." He showed, using a "geometrical method," that the infinite God was one with nature. For 10 points, name this lensgrinder who was kicked out of Amsterdam's Jewry for his pantheistic Ethics.